Creating a custom theme

Ghost comes with a beautiful default theme called Casper, which is designed to be a clean, readable publication layout and can be adapted for most purposes. However, Ghost can also be completely themed to suit your needs. Rather than just giving you a few basic settings which act as a poor proxy for code, we just let you write code.

There are a huge range of both free and premium pre-built themes which you can get from the Ghost Theme Marketplace, or you can create your own from scratch.

Anyone can write a completely custom Ghost theme with some solid knowledge of HTML and CSS

Ghost themes are written with a templating language called handlebars, which has a set of dynamic helpers to insert your data into template files. For example: {{author.name}} outputs the name of the current author.

The best way to learn how to write your own Ghost theme is to have a look at the source code for Casper, which is heavily commented and should give you a sense of how everything fits together.

default.hbs is the main template file, all contexts will load inside this file unless specifically told to use a different template.